Leadership

Last week I argued that culture is an often overlooked and important part of the employee experience – and it is.

However, having a great culture is only part of the story – as we all well know, we can’t suboptimise ourselves to greatness.

A great employee experience is not about how high a fuzzy-feel-good factor you can score. It’s about sense making and meaning. Is this meaningful to me or not?

When things are meaningful, we thrive; when things become meaningless, we suffer.

When you look at it this way, it becomes clear it is not enough to make part of the employee experience pleasant. It is not about the free fruit or great lunch service. That is also important, but it’s also just another part – the same way that our culture is only a part of the whole experience.

So, if we recapitulate.

We are striving for high levels of engagement. Engagement emerges from an individual feeling of motivation, enthusiasm – call it what you like – but it is something that starts on the inside of an individual and it is influenced by the three other parts: culture, physical environment (system) and the job that we get to do (and how we are allowed to do it).

This is the very simple explanation why it is so incredibly difficult to achieve consistently high levels of engagement. If you are not hitting all the elements more or less perfectly, there is no engagement.

We can have exciting challenging jobs, but in a horrible culture that is not meaningful for very long. We can work in the loveliest of cultures, but where ‘nothing seems to really work around here’. That is also not meaningful. And, finally, we can build these beautiful work environments with lovely cultures, but everything is so controlled, right down to how I am supposed to do every little detail, and that is not meaningful either.

And, to top it off, we must, of course, mention the fourth variable – the individual. None of this works the same for everyone. Each individual has their preferences and their ideas of what is meaningful to them.

So, if you have a day where you feel frustrated that you have tried everything to create a great workplace, don’t despair! Getting it right is really hard, but if you manage to do so, the pay-off is amazing.

How is that for a meaningful challenge?

If you are interested in exploring what it takes to develop engagement you are welcome to download my free e-book here

Think about it for a moment…, what is one thing you could work at that would dramatically improve your performance as a leader?

My theory is that most of us could improve the quality of our decisions. When I look at my own life and try to identify some of the main causes of difficult times, frustrations, etc., they can quite clearly be attributed to decisions that I have taken or possibly not take, which is in itself a decision.

So why is it hard for us to take consistently great decisions?

We are not as rational as we would like to be. We like to think of ourselves as super rational, but in reality, we are not. We make up a story that explains the irrational decision we took in order to convince ourselves and others how rational we are. Often, not always, it is bullsh*t.

We don’t understand what is really going on. We are looking at a situation through our own limiting mental models, and we confuse what in reality is just our perspective with reality or the truth.

We don’t take the trouble to gather enough information. We take decisions based on a few facts plus our own gut feeling. Sometimes it works brilliantly, but more often than not is doesn’t. A classic in this category is confusing our assumptions with facts. We think we know, but in reality, we are just assuming, and as my favourite coaching colleague from the US always used to say: Never forget Mike, that assumption is the mother of all f… ups.

So how do we work on improving the quality of our decisions? Once again it comes back to awareness. What we are aware of we can control, what we are not aware of controls us.

So the first thing to do is to start a decision journal.

Dedicate a notebook to this. And whenever you need to make a consequential decision, take a moment to think through: What are the options? What is your decision and what do you expect to happen? Make a note as well of your current state (tired, happy, stressed or whatever). Make space on the page for you to come back at a later time and note down what actually happened and what your key learning has been.

Start the decision journal today, by which I mean get it ready and commit to using it. Then the next time you need to take a significant decision, take the trouble to document it. Then on a regular basis go back and review your notes. Is there a pattern? What are you learning?

If you would like to get more sophisticated about this, check out this blog post from Farnam Street.

My personal experience of doing this is that I became aware that I had a tendency to take a certain type of decision very quickly, typically when something had not turned out as I expected and I felt an urgent need to correct the course. But what I had not previously noticed is that whenever something turns out different than what we expect, it triggers an emotional reaction and that emotional reaction would often tilt my decision toward the first idea that came into my mind.

Once I became aware of this, I have tried to postpone that kind of decision, to give myself time to get a different perspective, to resist the urge and that has definitely prevented me from a few bad decisions in the past 6 months.

Proving the point that more than anything, becoming aware of our own decision-making process helps us avoid the really bad decisions more than it makes us genius decision makers, but already that is not too shabby an outcome for many of us.

And what about your team? What is the one thing that really causes you frustration when you look at the people who report to you? If you in any way resemble many of the leaders that I coach, you will say: The quality of their decision… If only they could be trusted to take better decisions, my life would be so much easier.

Can you help your team make better decisions as well? Absolutely! It’s all about awareness, remember. We will have a look at how to do that in next week’s blog post.

This the thirteenth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

So how much output do we get from someone when we hire them to do a fair day’s work?

Well, there is quite a lot of research that indicates that on average, we are getting somewhere between 30 and 50% of what people are actually capable of.

This is also reflected in the Gallup engagement research that shows that +/- 65% of the workforce is not particularly engaged in their work. If you are not engaged, you are probably also not giving it your best.

So what are the barriers for our people to give their best? The top three, according to the research are:

Rules, regulations, and structure in the organisation

Lack of feedback and encouragement

The leadership style of the immediate supervisor

So to put it in a nutshell: If you are not getting max output from your team, it is probably because of you.

Yes, let that sink in for a moment.

That is not because you are a slave driver with psychopathic tendencies, at least I hope not.

More likely your are just an accidental diminisher. Accidental because when you have a diminishing impact, you are likely to be completely unaware of it and probably the last to know.

The first thing you need to think about is your own assumptions and beliefs.

You see, diminishers see intelligence as based on elitism and scarcity. Diminishers appear to believe that really intelligent people are a rare breed and that they are of that rare breed. This naturally leads them to conclude that they are special and that other people will never work out what to do without them.

They also seem to follow a logic that says people that don’t ‘get it’ now probably never will. Therefore, I need to do all the thinking around here.

This is what Caroll Dweck, author of Mindset, would call a limiting mindset.

The Multipliers, on the other hand, have a growth mindset, which is a fundamental belief that basic qualities like intelligence and ability can be cultivated through effort.

Multipliers get more from their people because they are leaders who look beyond their own genius and focus their energy on extracting and extending the genius of others. And they don’t get just a little more back; they get vastly more.
_Liz Wiseman

As we all well know, our assumptions and beliefs govern our behaviour.

So the diminisher typically displays some or all of the following behaviours:

Micromanage things

Do most or all of the talking at team meetings

Have the answers and ask few questions

Be judgmental and critical of others

Create stressful environments that often do not feel safe

Take fast decisions (as opposed to getting everyone buy in)

Drown the team with new ideas and initiatives

So here are a few questions to ask yourself and reflect on:

How might I be shutting down the ideas and actions of others, despite having the best of intentions?

What am I inadvertently doing that might be having a diminishing impact on others?

How might my intentions be interpreted differently by others?

What messages might my actions actually be conveying?

What could I do differently, that would make more space for the to contribute and grow?

These questions can be tricky to get feedback on from your direct reports, for obvious reasons. But what you can ask when there is the right opportunity is: Is there anything that I could do differently that would help you do a better job?

This the twelveth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

The short answer to that is that we are deeply biased. Despite all our good intentions about delivering superb customer service, we time and again end up seeing the situations from our own point of view. And using that point of view, we make assumptions about what we think the customer is experiencing. But unless we actually walk in their shoes, we have no clue what they are experiencing.

I see this time and again when I give workshops that introduce Service Design to groups of service providers. In order for them to really understand what this is about, I let them try it for real. So we pretend that they are a group of city tourism planners that need to improve the tourism experience in our city. In order to do that, I let them choose a persona situation and set up their hypothesis (or assumption) for this experience.

One team of three said that navigating the Copenhagen subway is very hard if you don’t speak Danish. Another team of three had the assumption that tourists easily pick the wrong kind of restaurants and end up in the tourist traps. And other groups pick other similar situations that they felt had some problems seen from a tourist point of view. So we sent them out for a 3-hourr field study. Armed with just their iPhones, we asked them to bring back proof in the form of pictures or recorded testimonials that confirmed their basic assumption (so that we could start working on ideas for improvements).

So what happened?

None of the teams could prove their assumption to be correct, none. What they thought a tourist experience was like (here in their own home city) was nowhere near what the tourists said they experienced.

So then I had to ask them: So how many of the assumptions that you have made about how your customer experience your service do you think are accurate?

Food for thought: How can we test our own assumptions about our own service product?

The same way as we did with the tourists. We get out of the office and we observe, document and collect lots of testimonials in the actual situations (not post-experience 6-page surveys, please). With that raw data, we can now start truly talking about what we need to do to improve our various touchpoints.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to do that ground work, your next best solution is to ask a group of students (Anthropologists or service designers) and have them do the real-time observations for you.

Map out the guest journey. Record your assumptions at the critical touch points: “Our breakfast is the best in town.” or “Our meeting facilities are perfect.”; “Guests think our coffee shop has the perfect selection.” Now ask the researchers to prove you right if they can.

Don’t forget: Assumption is the mother of all f… ups.

This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future’s posts, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.

It is true that in the Service Profit Chain framework, there is a huge emphasis on establishing loyalty; loyalty is the key driver of profit and growth.

Before we can even hope to establish a relationship that will lead to loyalty, we must ensure that we have a firm grip on the basics and that we can deliver on our promise every time. The keyword here is consistency, the key driver of basic satisfaction.

Consistency or lack of consistency is also one of my pet grievances. Consistency is the flip side of reliability. If as a customer I had a great experience last week, you as a service provider have implicitly promised me that I will have the same experience when I return next week.

If not, you are not only unreliable in my eyes, but you are also performing below my expectations, and we all know that meeting expectations is the first key to customer satisfaction.

This is a balancing act because, on the one hand, we would like to see creativity and initiative on the part of our teams, but on the other hand, we need to deliver a product that is as expected.

The name of the game is to generate repeat business. Customers return to get more of what they enjoyed the first time. If they don’t get that, then they could just as well have gone somewhere else.

Just think back for a moment about how many times in your life you had a great experience somewhere, and then went back only to find that what you had last time was not what you got the next time. Did you go back a third time just to make sure?

Probably not.

Where do you go frequently? Most probably to a place that is very consistent in some aspect of their service delivery that is important to you. That consistency is what brings you back.

Requiring consistency in the delivery process is universal across all types of services. It is the foundation of your success, and that applies to all service businesses, the way your insurance company processes your claim, the way the consultant interacts with you, how your auditing firm performs the audit. You return to the same supplier in all of these situations because you liked the way he or she did the work.

Together with emotions, consistency is an important element in our ability to recall one service experience more easily than others. You remember the consistently good experiences. They stand out. You have a much harder time remembering inconsistent experiences because you easily confuse them with all of the other inconsistent experiences that you have had.

Customers come back to experiences that consistently live up to their expectations. When that happens, we call it loyalty. Loyalty is built on consistency. Never forget that.

So take a good hard look at your basic processes, are they consistent?

This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future’s posts, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.

In this post, I would like to explain the 6 key ingredients in creating a dream team:

The Right People

Careful selection of new recruits. Hire for attitude. Train for skills. Coach for performance and that includes dealing with the bad apples.

Continuous Improvement

Best in class training and development at all levels in the organization. Continuous improvement is considered one of the great benefits of the job. “In this job, I grow”…

Great Support Systems

Service is not just something the frontline does for our customers. Service is our culture. Employees and managers, who do not have customer contact, service the employees that do. (Our IT department is not the IT-Police – it is an internal service department that supports the frontline in getting the job done.)

Empowerment/autonomy

The best service employees take pride in solving the problem on the spot. So the freedom to act is hugely motivating. Southwest Airlines famously tells its employees, ”You may do anything you are not uncomfortable doing to solve a passenger’s problem.”

Clear Expectations

In the same way, that anyone who has made it to a great sports team knows what is expected of them, employees in the best service organisations also know what is expected of them. It is part of their motivation to be part of a team that is not afraid to set the bar high. Candour is a key element of high-performing teams.

Appropriate Rewards and Recognition

Focusing on what works, celebrating success, and acknowledging each other’s contributions makes work meaningful.

The principles are not complicated. There is no magic involved. But it requires commitment and persistence to get it right. When you do, the benefits are amazing.

You can download the Dream Team checklist below and benchmark yourself!

This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future’s posts, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.